There’s a compelling case for this model — a small, agile creative team embedded within or working alongside large architecture practices on urban-scale public projects. Here’s why it tends to produce better outcomes than either working alone:
What the small creative team brings
A tight-knit group of designers, artists, urbanists or thinkers operates with a shared instinct rather than a committee consensus. Decision-making is fast, risk tolerance is higher, and the design vision stays coherent from concept through to detail. There’s no dilution through layers of approval. Ideas that are genuinely strange or provocative can survive long enough to become powerful.
Small teams also tend to maintain a direct relationship with place — they walk the site obsessively, they talk to people who actually use the space, they develop an almost territorial understanding of a specific context. That intimacy is very hard to manufacture at scale.
What the large practice brings
Urban-scale public buildings and spaces require enormous technical, logistical and political infrastructure. Large practices hold the technical capacity — structural engineering coordination, planning expertise, procurement knowledge, contractor relationships, and the sheer personnel to deliver a project over a decade. They can absorb complexity without losing the thread entirely.
They also carry institutional credibility. Public clients, planning authorities and community stakeholders trust them with large budgets. Getting a genuinely ambitious creative vision through a planning process often requires the backing of a firm with a track record.
Why the combination works
The small team operates as a kind of creative conscience — holding the vision tight while the large practice manages the machinery of delivery. The best examples of this arrangement produce work that is both visionary and actually built, which is relatively rare. Neither party alone achieves this easily: the small team can’t build at urban scale without the infrastructure, and the large practice risks producing technically competent but creatively compromised work without an external voice that isn’t institutionally cautious.
There’s also a productive tension in the relationship. The small team pushes further than the large practice’s risk appetite would normally allow; the large practice grounds the vision in what is physically and legally possible. That friction, managed well, is generative.
The challenge to manage
The model only works if the creative team has genuine authorship protected in the contract and working relationship — not just a consultancy role that can be overridden. The moment the small team becomes decorative, lending credibility without real influence, the arrangement collapses into the worst of both worlds: slow, expensive, and bland.
The most successful examples tend to involve a personal relationship of trust between a principal in the large firm and the leader of the small team, where each understands what the other needs and neither mistakes their role for the other’s.